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Consider the case of EarthWater Global, a New York-based water company with roots in the petroleum industry.

For decades, Robert Bisson, the company's founder and president, applied his geological knowledge and technical skills to squeezing out more oil and natural gas. But the enhanced seismic imaging he was using to find oil also led to this discovery: The world holds much more fresh water than we currently appreciate.

"Virtually on every continent ... there exists an enormous amount of freshwater coming from mountains, like the Andes and the Himalayas and the Rocky Mountains," Bisson said. Water travels "through the mountains and going through the earth's crust, and then out into the sea or into evaporation."

In the 1970s, Bisson and his partners were using innovative mapping techniques to determine how oil could migrate upward from sediment, where it initially collects, through rock fractures and up into hard rock closer to the earth's surface. It was a "needle in a haystack" quest to drill cheaper wells, he said.

"Our job was to characterize the haystack and figure out how basically the petroleum, these fluids, could move through these rocks, given our understanding of plate tectonics, rock mechanics, how rocks break," Bisson told government and industry officials at the International Water Conference here last week.

'Megawatersheds'

Bisson and his team were trying some 30 years ago to find oil in South America's Pacific Coast, where two tectonic plates crashing together formed the Andes mountain chain. But they discovered that water acts in unexpected ways deep underground.

Intense pressure leads to water not only flowing down, as gravity dictates, but also up and even sideways. Just as Saudi Arabia stumbled across massive oil reserves in its search for water, Bisson's team found massive quantities of water while searching for oil.

EarthWater Global calls its discoveries "megawatersheds," and it estimates that the recoverable quantities are enormous.

Initial studies put the figure at more than a billion cubic meters of fresh groundwater per year, in such bone-dry locales as the highlands of Afghanistan, southern Sudan and northern Ethiopia. To date, his company has developed about 200 million cubic meters per year of what he insists is a renewable source of fresh water. Many of these wells have been producing reliable, pure water for 20 years.

But governments worried about future water supplies need not despair if their countries do not have mountain ranges. EarthWater Global's greatest success story to date is found in the small Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, which hired the company in the late 1990s to help alleviate a devastating 10-year drought there.

Enhanced seismic imaging and EarthWater's new understanding of water mechanics, coupled with existing knowledge of Trinidad and Tobago's oil and gas geology, allowed the firm to precisely locate and drill relatively cheap wells that effectively ended the drought in 1999.

"We brought a new technology, or a new discovery, based on an existing oil and gas mineral exploration group of technologies, combined with modern geotectonic theories, geological theories," Bisson said. "And [we] brought to the Caribbean ... the first ever example of increasing the water balance of this country tenfold within a year."

'Water stress' rising

While oil and water don't mix, the planet's most heavily consumed commodities have much in common.

Oil is best known as a source of transportation fuel, but it is also used to make plastics, petrochemicals and even fertilizers. Much of the world's water is used by agriculture, but it is also used in a host of industrial applications, including enhanced oil and gas recovery and refining.

The two also share similar economic characteristics. "Peak oil" theorists complain that the marketplace has under-priced oil for far too long, and they even suggest current record prices are still too low when compared to prices of other items. Likewise, despite the enormous quantities consumed every day, water from the tap is still extremely cheap in most of the world. In the United States, most households pay the equivalent of less than 2 cents per gallon for tap water. For U.S. farmers, water is effectively free, thanks to government-subsidized irrigation.

Because oil and water have been cheap for so long, society has taken both for granted, experts say. Both are objects of tremendous waste and inefficient use. The world economy is now beginning to feel the consequences of this trend as oil prices have shot up to new record highs, many experts argue.

Growing population and urbanization mean much more future water consumption.

The United Nations fears that two-thirds of all nations will become "water stressed" by 2050, with close to 2 billion people living in countries facing "absolute water scarcity," U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Thomas Stelzer said last week. Many municipalities in drier areas are already struggling to maintain supplies.

It was against a background of dwindling oil reserves that Bisson and his partners set out on their initial investigation of tectonic processes. Enhanced oil and gas recovery techniques in turn led to the creation of EarthWater Global and its enhanced water recovery technology.

And the world may soon see many more examples of oil prospectors becoming water prospectors, if the economics play out right.

'Something quite different'

Unbeknownst to many, thousands of oil wells pumping crude in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and elsewhere are actually producing more water than oil. Most U.S. onshore wells are considered marginal, with many producing five barrels of oil a day or less. They achieve even this by mostly pumping out water and oil together, then separating the oil. Industry estimates suggest that for every barrel of oil extracted, 50 to 100 barrels of water are captured.

Most of this water is pumped right back into the ground, to facilitate further oil extraction. But many water company executives, including Jeff Fulgham of GE Water & Process Technologies, said oil companies should consider treating some of this water and selling it.

In another publicized example, oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is busy purchasing land in the Texas Panhandle that sits on the Ogallala Aquifer, a massive underground water reserve encompassing much of the Midwest. He hopes to someday sell the water to Dallas or other nearby cities. The transition would be easy, since the oil industry can readily apply the same underground mapping, drilling and pipeline technologies they have mastered to capturing and delivering groundwater.

But there are concerns that the same problems that plague the oil industry could follow it to the water business. Already the Ogallala, for example, is being depleted in most places as the water is withdrawn at a greater rate than it can replenish itself. Should Pickens drill to supply Dallas, he may see the same thing that is happening to his oil wells happen to water wells: Production initially gushes, then peaks, then precipitously declines.

Bisson insists this won't happen to his wells. Poor geological understanding and a lack of careful development planning are at fault for shrinking the Ogallala, he said, but better technology lets his company more accurately understand the amount of water available and the flow patterns, to improve the position of his wells and ensure the resource won't be depleted.

"We're going in and doing something quite different from the outset," he said.

Key issue: water rights

To avoid over-extraction, EarthWater identifies "the geography and geometry of emplacement of these conductors, and where recharge is coming from, and how the water is stored, and what the chemistry of the rock is ... and how best to tap into it."

Those concerned about the parallels between oil depletion and future water scarcity can also be heartened by one fundamental difference between the two resources.

Once oil is burned, it is gone forever. But water is virtually indestructible.

Anything short of a complex process to destroy the molecular bond of H20, and the water we have today will be with us tomorrow. The key to avoiding future scarcity, water experts say, is more efficient use, reuse and distribution.

"The good news is that water doesn't go away," said Chuck Martz, global marketing director at Dow Water Solutions. "It just moves around and gets dirty."

Still, it is unlikely that we will see Big Oil become Big Water anytime soon, and not only because of profitability concerns.

Most communities worldwide hold a strong emotional attachment to their water rights. So experts say large-scale privatization is out of the question, at least for now.

But the petroleum industry is beginning to creep into the water business. Companies like Halliburton and Schlumberger already do brisk business drilling and maintaining wells for state-owned oil and gas companies.

It does not take much for these firms to adopt a new business segment and compete with EarthWater in providing technical assistance to water utilities. Schlumberger already has a groundwater services division, a clear sign that the industry sees water as a growth opportunity.

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